Bangalore-based Vimal Chandran resigned from Honeywell, a technology company, three weeks ago after seven years as a techie. The 28-year-old part time photographer and painter decided to go full time as he was getting enough work in his areas of interest and still earning the same as an IT professional. He gets most of his assignments in wedding, lifestyle and fashion photography from his Facebook page, which was created three years ago and currently boasts of 73,000 likes.

?Even people who call me have come to know through recommendations from Facebook friends. I work for two days a month now and earn almost like in IT apart from being selective about the work I want to do,? says Chandran who charges upwards of R70,000 per assignment. Chandran started uploading his photos of his travel on Facebook some four years back as a hobby that has now morphed into a full-time job.

Social networking giant Facebook is looking up to people like Chandran and other small and medium businesses (SMBs) to look for consumers rather than publicity on the platform. The Nasdaq-listed $5 billion company aims to grow itself beyond a social network and develop itself into a market place for products and services taking on internet giants like Google and Amazon. The firm is looking at its billion users to look for products and services recommended by their social network on Facebook itself, rather than losing the most lucrative revenue opportunity to its competitors in the internet world.

Facebook, which currently has 16 million SMBs listed, had established partnership with industry lobby, Ficci in 2012 with SMB Ad Boost Programme, helping SMBs in low-cost market access through the social Web and thus helping them to increase their competitiveness and productivity.

Internet major Google?s Indian arm also runs a similar programme with the Indian government called ?Getting Businesses Online? that is targeting almost five lakh businesses to set up their own website. Along with this and the Google Local and Google Plus pages, the company feels that it provides a platform for small and medium players to reach consumers in a easier and cost effective way.

?We are talking about SMBs like an online fashion retailer in India, a dentist in Tokyo or a bicycle store in Singapore. They are seeing a lot of momentum on our platform as they have woken up to a way of doing their business in a smarter manner. We are helping them make this business more successful,? says Andy Hwang, general manager, SMBs, Asia

Pacific, Facebook.

Hwang feels typically such small businesses, which are based on an idea, want to involve the community into it and Facebook provides that interactivity. ?India is important for us and we are looking at investing in the market. Not from a product point of view, but from a service perspective. We are still on-boarding lot of businesses in India,? notes Hwang.

Facebook has a programme called Start to Success that helps SMBs for 28 days in setting up campaigns to meet their advertising and marketing product. The company is also offering credit to trial the product.

The Menlo Park California headquartered firm, which has 78 million monthly users in India, has also recently launched a page manager app for phones so that SMBs can update the pages from mobile phones. They can promote also from mobile phones. This was specifically created keeping in mind the SMBs. ?India is a mobile market and most

of our users are coming from

mobile and we are serving them on tablets and feature phones,? adds Hwang.

The company,which has now one million active advertisers, feels that unlike other platforms Facebook allows business to target the exact customers they are looking for. For instance, SMBs may want to reach people in a specific age group of a specific gender. ?They can target users based on their habits or interests. Whether they are using a smartphone or a feature phone. They wish to be cost effective while reaching their customers. The pricing depends on how many people the enterprises want to reach,? he says adding that the SMBs also have the

option of promoting only the posts they want to.

According to Hwang, what differentiates Facebook from the other players out there is that the

social network revolves around people. ?It is that word of the mouth megaphone and the persuasion power is much greater as the recommendations from friends and family are always more powerful.? The company, which commissioned a TNS Global survey, a market research firm, on usage and attitude, has found that 50% of the users used Facebook to know more about a product and one in three has made a purchase based on recommendation. Almost 60% users also plan to make purchases based on the Facebook recommendations, the survey says.

The companies are well aware of this and making use of the advantages. For instance, Marico?s Kaya Skin Clinic, which has more than 100 clinics across 20 cities, drive awareness about their physical stores and generate walk-in at their stores through the platform. They help the customers with the location, about new products and services on the social network. They also let them to book

appointments online.

?SMBs may use for various reasons but what we do is make it simple and easy to use. They can just get started in a few minutes by making a page. We also listen to our SMB customers and have found that time and money are the most important issues for advertising their products,? says Hwang. Usually the individual posts on Facebook stream are not searchable on search engines like Google. But the company has made the pages for SMBs public and are searchable using search engines helping them reach users beyond Facebook.

According to Facebook, it is seeing people increasingly using social media as something more than publicity to connect with

existing as well as potential customers. ?Our way of monetisation is that what people today start in advertising with a few dollars will be spending much more later as they want to reach even more users according to their expanding business,? says Hwang.